Program

The Ph.D. Program in French at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY) offers an innovative combination of traditional training in French and Francophone Literatures with interdisciplinary curricular options.

Successful applicants receive a $ 25,000 fellowship for five years, tuition waiver and health insurance. In exchange they teach one course per semester in their second, third and fourth year at one of CUNY senior colleges. In their fifth year, students serve as writing fellows.The deadline for applications is January 1st, 2017. More information can be found at http://www.gc.cuny.edu/french

Outside reviewers recently rated the Ph.D. Program in French at The Graduate Center of the City University of New York one of the finest and most innovative in the United States. They praised the program’s double objective: educating generalists to teach traditional courses and specialists in postcolonial and francophone studies.

Recent graduates wrote theses on “Engendering Islands: Representations of Difference in the Seventeenth-Century French Caribbean,” “Jules Verne constructs America: from Utopia to Dystopia,” “Inscription du passé colonial dans la littérature urbaine contemporaine,” and “Unidentified Verbal Objects: Contemporary French Poetry, Intermedia, and Narrative.” Our recent alumni have secured teaching positions at Saint John’s University, Williams College, University of South Carolina, and Hobart and William Smith Colleges. Our older alumni teach at Swathmore College, University of California at Irvine, and the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. Other alumni hold administrative positions at Bennington College, Fordham University, and Sarah Lawrence College. A handful of our graduates have found successful careers outside of academia. For example, one alumna landed a full-time position at Yale University assisting professors with digital humanities while another works at a prominent art gallery in New York City.

Our multidisciplinary program has attracted students from Cameroon, Canada, France, Great Britain, Haiti, Israel, Ivory Coast, Lebanon, Russia, Singapore, and the US with varied backgrounds that range beyond traditionally defined literary interests. Among our successful candidates we count two art historians, two professional translators, two philosophers, a journalist, a lawyer, and a political scientist. These students add a different perspective to classroom discussions and make our program an intellectually vibrant place to study.